Installation Newbie with install question

[mercsim]

About 10 years ago I spent many hours in front of Mercury 5.0. I switched to a Mac and always dreamed of getting back to Orbiter. Recently my Wife was going to toss her old Dell with XP on it so I stepped in and saved it. Thought it was a good chance to get back to Orbiter.

About a week later and I am totally having a ball! I have installed, uninstalled, deleted, copied and all in between about a hundred times. The old Dell is pretty slow so it takes a LOT of time. I have stuck to Orbiter2010 for now.

Why can't I use the msi installer after I delete an Orbiter folder? It always makes me go thru the uninstall process and it looks like its doing stuff, even though I deleted the folder.

FWIW, I have been playing with modifying Add-ons. Its educating, frustrating and I often CTD because I miss something. EX. One of my favorite spaceships is the X-37B. I just wanted to play in orbit and land it so I had to do some modifying to liber's excellant add-on. It got me familiar with all of Vinka's stuff for sure and I'm getting there

 

[Keithth G]

If you use a Mac, have you tried Wineskin Winery?

This is a good way of running Orbiter on an emulated Windows XP system. Wineskin creates a 'wrapper' - in effect, a 'ew' bare-bones XP system - which can then run .exe and .msi files by having the wrapper point to the correct executable file (once those files have been copies to the emulated XP file structure inside the wrapper).

I too have a Mac (Macbook Pro), and this is how I use Orbiter 2010. Works fine - and with frame rates of around 200 to 300.

Wineskin Winery Download Page

 

[martins]

Why can't I use the msi installer after I delete an Orbiter folder? It always makes me go thru the uninstall process and it looks like its doing stuff, even though I deleted the folder.

If you install via the MSI installer, then Windows owns the app, and considers any manual de-installation as inappropriate interference. Until you run the Windows uninstaller, Orbiter is considered installed, and Windows only allows a single app instance. By deleting the folder manually, Windows simply assumes that you damaged the installation.

For many applications, this is not unreasonable behaviour, since the installation can involve more than just creating an application folder (e.g. adding stuff to the registry, installing libraries in the system folders, creating shortcuts and menu entries, registering file associations, etc.) So the uninstaller has to try and undo all these things.

If you find running the Windows uninstaller annoying, you can avoid this by installing from the zip file. Then you are responsible for the application, including creating an installation directory, unpacking the archive, creating/deleting desktop shortcuts, etc.

 

[mercsim]

Thank you for the great explanation Martin! I have done installs from the Zip folder. I have also copied a completely installed folder to try new stuff on. It all works good but I thought the installer was pretty slick.

Keith, I have played with Winery. I actually had Orbiter working. I'm bumping against hard drive space (120G on older MBP) so I have been sticking with the older XP machine I trash picked from my wife. It seems to be doing the job

Scott